Spec comparison: BlackBerry Z10 vs the competition

Last night BlackBerry CEO Thorstein Heins took the stage and announced the BlackBerry Z10, the company’s first smartphone running BlackBerry 10. Now from a user-interface perspective, the Z10 is very fascinating and unique when compared to its competitors but from a hardware standpoint it is just matching whatever is available in the market and in some cases it’s not even achieving that. That said, it certainly has solid hardware and can give a decent fight to its rivals on the basis of its unique software. Read on to find out more.

From a spec-sheet standpoint, it has a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, a 4.2-inch 1280×768 pixel display with 356 PPI, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a 8-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, 1,800 mAh battery, microSD card slot and even NFC connectivity.

These specs are more or less in line with a top of the line smartphone from last year. Even if one looks at the Samsung Galaxy S III or the Nokia Lumia 920, both have 720p displays and both have Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 plus dual-core CPUs (For the Galaxy S III only in the US and it has a quad-core processor in India). Even in terms of photography, the Galaxy S III has an 8-megapixel camera, but the Lumia 920 wins this round thanks to its 8.7-megapixel PureView camera that comes with Zeiss optics and optical image stabilization for incredible low-light performance.

Even the iPhone 5 toes a similar line. Its new 4-inch panel maintains a resolution of 1136x 640 with 326 PPI and it comes with Apple’s latest dual-core A6 chip. Additionally, it comes in multiple memory variants and has an 8-megapixel camera that is considered to be among the best.

If one adds the newly launched HTC Butterfly to the equation, then the BlackBerry Z10 starts looking dated. The Butterfly has a 5-inch 1080p display, a quad-core Qualcomm S4 Pro processor, 16GB of memory, microSD card support, an 8-megapixel camera with HTC’s image sense chip, Beats Audio, and is also water resistant.

But hardware specs are only half the story and BlackBerry is in a unique position as it would leverage the new BlackBerry platform to stop its current users from migrating to other platforms. But with the absence of Google services and no integrated real-time turn-by-turn navigation, it would be difficult for the company to make Android or iOS users shift to BlackBerry. But this is just the first step for the company and being able to convince its faithful subscribers to continue would be great.